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October, 2005

responses Dom: doc is all well and good until we start winning, and then we’ll get sued and FUDed to death. I don’t think it is a coincidence that of all the various formats you can view on a linux box, the best supported are actual open formats like HTML, or that there is the…

I’m at a panel on open document formats today. It is a weird mix of brilliance and fluff- Tim Bray in particular is just dead on- he argues for open standards as the precondition for actual, meaningful competition in the tools related to the standard. This is of course obvious on many levels, but I’d…

Met Rob Lucas and Denis Saulnier this morning. They are at Harvard’s Tech in Education program, and Denis is also taking classes at Kennedy School’s Social Entrepreneurship program. We talked quite a bit about playlists, and background and other such. Denis put together a less sophisticated but apparently reasonably successful first cut at lesson plan…

Lunch Blogging Today’s lunch guest is Joshua Schacter, who did delicious; turns out he also did memepool, which was metafilter before it was metafilter. So, wow, he is multiply cool. The chinese firewall apparently blocks delicious; I think that’s probably a good sign you’re doing something interesting. There are about 500K unique tags- that growth…

Work For the first time am beginning to feel like my plate is full at work- realized while going through my TODO today that it is getting quite long and quite serious. Ramping up is over and really getting the ass kicked is beginning. Random Stuff Apparently Boston will host Wikimania 2006. That should be…

Good weekend in New York with the family. Wicked is, I’m sure, an excellent and amusing book, but as a musical, it was… pretty mediocre. Naked Girl on the Appian Way was amusing, if not exactly High Art. Food was good, kids were surprisingly tolerant of MOMA and the Met. Not much more could be…

Talk went well. I’ll drop some GNOME jaws by reporting that I basically didn’t talk at all, and Hal did most of the talking :) Think there might be some interesting contacts coming out of it. Am in an interesting round table right now on open source; on the one hand, lots of people are…

Am at educause today. Some of the presentations are much more interesting than I’d expected- there is hope for education in general; people are doing really cool stuff. They seem to be doing a lot of it in proprietary software (there was an open source talk, but unfortunately I missed it) and often with proprietary…

VMware Philip: no need to worry about my, uh, ‘reviews’; I’ve been very impressed with the vmware beta’s polish. [For those who are at this moment spitting out their milk because Luis was using proprietary software, it was for my LSAT and GMAT review software, and I was very pleased by it.] This is exactly…

Plane Reading Finished The Great Influenza. The author’s writing style is terribly repetitive and hyperbolic, which irritated me pretty quickly, but the material is gripping- the devastating arc of the flu of 1918 (killed substantially more people in a couple months than AIDS has in 25 years, in a world with 1/3rd the population), enmeshed…